Wsj Article On Silver Investing.

Yep go physical

Thanks for posting the link to this article... interesting stuff for sure!



I had to laugh a bit at this, however. As a person who owns shares in the ETFS Silver Trust (SIVR) in my Roth IRA, I will not be paying ANY tax on my silver ETF gains.

I really do not see this as an either / or question. I own both a small amount of physical silver and the above mentioned ETF. Both have their advantages. The ETF is good because it is so easy to buy and sell... a few mouse clicks and, Presto... bought or sold! It tracks the price of silver quite closely and there are no premiums associated with it. Yes, they do charge a small fee for managing the investment but then so do all of my other paper investments... nothing new there. The fees are minuscule compared to the potential profits.

Finally, a trailing stop can be used with most ETFs that allows your stop price to rise with the share price but that will sell the shares if the price then pulls back by a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of the max price that I choose. This is a great way to protect an investment from a plunging market while still capturing the bulk of any gains. At worst, I get stopped out at a lower profit than I might have made by selling at the market top (a very rare event, BTW). At best, my shares sell at a higher price than I could manage to get via selling manually.

That is correct. Nothing in this world is permanent. The Roth IS the best we can do with the tools at hand, however. All of the money contributed to a Roth has already been taxed, so it is just the earnings on that money that is tax-free when distributed in an IRS approved manner.

I can see the politicians doing a number of things in this regard without actually ending the Roth tax-free status of current Roth owners. One would be changing the tax status for future Roth owners, as it is MUCH easier to $crew those in the future than those who vote NOW. Second, they could always institute a national sales tax or VAT so that Roth money would be taxed when spent as well as when placed in the Roth. The current administration is VERY Euro-centric, so them proposing a VAT would not be any surprise whatever. The good news is that with a Republican controlled House, the chance of that becoming law is about nil.



That is a possibility but not one with a lot of potential. Such moves in most investments are quite rare events. Recently, this has happened a couple of times but was usually due to a market equipment failure of some kind that was quickly remedied and any trades made during the glitch were repudiated.

Such a price move would not be manageable via the use of any other technique that I know, so this is about the best that can be done to protect the investment. As with the Roth itself, we do the best we can with the tools at hand. As far as I know at the moment, this is about as good as can be managed. No, this does not have a 100% guarantee... but then, what does?